Lady Walton

Lady Walton, who died on Sunday aged 83, devoted the whole of her 35-year
marriage to the composer Sir William Walton to being the perfect wife for a
creative artist; at La Mortella, their home on the island of Ischia in the
Bay of Naples, she created one of the great gardens of the world.

In 1948, as Susana Gil, a 22-year-old Argentine secretary and interpreter, she married Walton, then 46 and at the height of his powers. She was Roman Catholic, a virgin and innocent in the ways of men. By all conventional standards her husband treated her heinously, conducting numerous affairs with other women and forcing her to resort to a backstreet abortionist when she became pregnant.

Yet she rose triumphantly above such indignities and was no self-effacing martyr to her husband's genius. Volatile, elegant, strikingly beautiful, and with a liking for spectacular hats, she refused to give in to jealousy or self-pity and remained spirited and cheerful throughout their years together, providing Walton with the security he needed for his art.

After Walton's death in 1983, she endowed La Mortella as a music centre and living memorial to the composer and went on to write a lively and entertaining memoir of his life, Behind the Façade (1988).

Susana Gil Basso was born in Buenos Aires on August 30 1926 into a prominent Argentine landowning family. Her father, Don Enrique Gil, an Anglophile lecturer and lawyer, decreed that his children were to learn English before they were allowed to speak their native tongue. Susana was educated at a college run by Spanish nuns where she took a diploma in accountancy followed by a degree as a public translator in English.

At a time when girls were still supposed to be chaperoned, Susana found a full-time job in the Buenos Aires office of the British Council, causing considerable consternation in her family. This was where she was working when she met William Walton in September 1948. Walton was in Buenos Aires as one of the delegates to an international conference of the Performing Right Society.

Related Articles

Their relationship did not begin auspiciously. Susana organised a morning press conference for the composer at which he was introduced as "not as important as Benjamin Britten". That evening, they attended a cocktail party. As soon as he saw her, Walton told Britten, who was also a delegate at the conference: "I think I'll marry that girl over there." Sauntering over, he announced: "You will be very surprised, Miss Gil, to hear that I'm going to marry you." She replied that he must be drunk.

He repeated the proposal every day for a fortnight, then one day, he said: "I'm never going to ask you again." But by this time she felt sure that she would have to accept, and told him to try once more.

As a marriage prospect, it seemed she could hardly have made a worse choice. Walton was a notorious womaniser whose long-standing affair with Alice Viscountess Wimborne, who was much older than him, had just ended painfully with her death from cancer. In his hotel in Buenos Aires he had been finding consolation in the company of an old flame who lent him a ring to give to Susana on their engagement. He was far from gallant during their courtship, once observing that her only virtue was "not knowing anything about music".

When they married in December 1948, Susana's father was so distressed that he spent her dowry on champagne for the 2,000 wedding guests to drown their sorrows. Back in England, Walton's mother, in Oldham, was equally unhappy, responding glumly with the words: "Has the Pope got him?"

The marriage began unpromisingly. Walton had given Susana a sex manual as a wedding present but informed her, on their wedding night, that children made him physically sick and that if she had any, he would divorce her. Unfortunately, neither he nor the manual had bothered to explain to her the mysteries of contraception and, inevitably, she soon became pregnant.

By this time the Waltons had moved to London, and it was clear that Susana would have to choose between Walton and the baby. She had no hesitation. Her husband, she decided, must come first. "As an artist, he needed space. He needed his wife to defend that space," she explained. After employing the services of a backstreet abortionist in Chelsea, she was dangerously ill for a week.

Characteristically though, Walton saw himself as the real victim of this distressing affair. Years later, when Sir Malcolm Sargent upbraided him for denying Susana children, Walton flew into a rage and ejected them both from the house. Sargent pushed off home, leaving Susana on the doorstep waiting for her husband to cool down and let her back in.

Meanwhile, she had been obliged to come to terms with his infidelities: when she was newly-arrived in London, friends warned her – some bitchily, some out of genuine kindness – of his inevitable philandering. When Kenneth Clark (later Lord Clark "of Civilisation") and his wife Jane, an amour of her husband's, gave a party to introduce her to his friends, she was escorted there by Lady (Christabel) Aberconway, who said to her: "My dear, of all the women you will meet tonight, I will probably be the only one who has not been to bed with William. Such a pity." Walton later informed Susana that he had almost succeeded in rectifying this oversight, but that they had been disturbed by Osbert Sitwell.

Susana learned to be good-humoured about her husband's affairs: "William had a very soft spot for ladies," she recalled. "But once I discovered it was not for keeps, I thought, this is wonderful. I saw this thing was just a flare; that it would be non-human not to respond to beauty."

She never warmed to Jane Clark, though – hardly surprising when Laurence Olivier told her that Jane Clark was going around saying: "Poor Willy. Look at that ghastly young creature he's married!"

When Walton made Susana give away most of her wedding gifts, she distributed her handbags to his old girlfriends: "Jane Clark got the green snake." Later, at Walton's 70th birthday party, hosted by Edward Heath at 10 Downing Street, Susana observed with amusement that Jane Clark was so drunk that she twice fell off her chair.

Susana had to make other cultural adjustments. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were among the first to invite the Waltons for a weekend to their mill at Snape in Suffolk: "I was quite perplexed to see Peter and Ben shared a double bed," she recalled, "a situation I should now take in my stride, but which shocked me at the time."

Another even less welcome discovery was that Walton, though eminent, was also hard up. He made only about £3,000 a year and, though he had been left a house in Belgravia by Alice Wimborne, the days of private patronage – or "scrounging", as he described it – were over. The Waltons decided that the only way to make ends meet was to live abroad.

They left London to settle on the island of Ischia. They purchased a property on Zaro, a hill in an attractive but barren and volcanic corner of the island, naming the site "La Mortella", after the wild myrtles which grew in profusion. There they built a house carved into the native volcanic rock. Since, after the war, they were unable to transfer money overseas, Susana Walton kept things going by smuggling money and essential provisions like tobacco in hot water bottles.

In 1956 she began work on the garden. Created on the site of a gigantic stone quarry, extending over an area of 16,000 square metres, and originally designed by Russell Page, the garden at La Mortella has become one of the most famous in the world, containing thousands of unusual and exotic species, with spectacular floral vistas, high-flying fountains and sparkling "chains" of water running along narrow rills.

La Mortella was a hideaway affording Walton space to fulfil his genius and entertain his friends. But his greatest days as a composer were over. Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes had swept all before it, and Walton's music began to be seen as old hat.

His opera Troilus and Cressida flopped at its first performance at Covent Garden in 1953, largely because of the incompetent conducting of Sir Malcolm Sargent. When Sargent fumbled up Susana's skirts as she drove him back from rehearsals, she confessed that she was "more outraged by the fact that he hadn't bothered to learn the score".

But the Waltons were happy in their volcanic idyll, where they played host to such visitors as Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Terence Rattigan, Binkie Beaumont, Maria Callas and Charlie Chaplin. By the 1960s Walton, who had been knighted in 1951 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1967, was recognised as one of the great men of British music, and the Waltons' rare visits to London often turned into quasi-State occasions. Walton's 80th birthday in 1982 was celebrated as a national event.

Susana Walton was devastated by her husband's death and haunted by his last words to her: "Don't ever leave me." She drifted off to India and saw a guru before returning to Italy, where she decided to honour her husband's memory by setting up the William Walton Trust and Foundation, which provides facilities for aspiring musicians, actors, and dancers. It also includes a music room, where she held concerts on Sunday afternoons.

Lady Walton remained spirited and elegant into old age, but never considered marrying again, feeling that her relationship with Walton had been "too strong to be repeated".

She was appointed MBE in 2000 for her commitment to her husband's legacy and for her energy and efforts on behalf of young people.